Chimpanzees

The 62-year-old man mauled by two chimpanzees in March was taken out of his medically induced coma last week at Loma Linda University Medical Center and is starting a slow recovery, his attorney said. Meanwhile, the owner of the animal sanctuary where St. James Davis of West Covina was attacked while visiting his pet chimp Moe said she is asking state authorities to find the pet a new home.

February 15, 1988 | Compiled by Times Science Writer Thomas Maugh II from research presented at the meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Boston last week

Among primates, making peace is as natural as making war, according to a primatologist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This behavior indicates that mechanisms to alleviate tension in human relationships evolved together with aggression, said Frans B. M. de Waal. "Most animal behavior is explained in terms of a struggle for existence and animals are depicted as very competitive and very selfish," de Waal said.

In the more than two decades since the U.S. government declared chimpanzees in the wild to be an endangered species, not much has improved for those great apes. The threats of habitat loss, poaching and disease have only intensified. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed reclassifying captive chimpanzees as well, moving them from the "threatened" category to "endangered," a change that brings with it stricter guidelines covering the handling and use of the animals. In the future, any procedure that harms, harasses or kills a research chimp would require a permit.

The Wildlife Waystation is continuing its efforts to obtain a group of chimpanzees retired earlier this year from medical research, but many of the primates originally sought by the animal refuge are no longer available for adoption, officials said.

Just like enterprising humans, chimpanzees can be good team players to achieve their goals, according to a new study. The findings, published in Biology Letters, give a glimpse into the possible origins of human cooperative behavior. With the lure of a juicy grape before them and two specialized tools in hand, chimps were able to work in pairs and free the fruit from a complex trap, according to a pair of European researchers working at the...

The government has declared wild chimpanzees an endangered species, a move that will provide additional federal protection for man's closest relative, officials confirmed Friday. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had classified the primate as a "threatened" species, but officials said that more protection was needed in view of recent studies documenting a drastic decline in the populations of wild chimps in Africa.

His tiny hands clenched into balls, his frail body trembling with fear, 9-month-old Lucky awaits prospective buyers at a market in Istanbul. He's not easy to spot. Lucky spends the day confined in a dark, musty attic at the Istanbul Animal Emporium. "We're not really supposed to be selling chimps," the owner says with a conspiratorial wink, "but I'll let you have this one for $8,000."

On Thursday, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said he would follow the advice of the Institute of Medicine and limit the number and types of biomedical research experiments that involve chimpanzees. Ultimately, he said, the number of studies that use the animals would fall from 37 to about 20 or fewer. Chimpanzees were first recruited for use in biomedical research because they share all but 200,000 of the 3 billion chemical letters that make up humanDNA.

A troupe of performing chimpanzees became unwitting cohorts in a simian joy ride Saturday morning, when a man stole a van sitting outside a gas station in Castaic. Larry Sturchen, a 30-year-old transient, was arrested on suspicion of grand theft auto, grand theft property and drunk driving by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies after a 15-minute chase. Deputies apprehended Sturchen on a dirt road west of Interstate 5, said Sgt. David Stunson of the Santa Clarita Valley station.

A clever chimpanzee that made monkeys out of her zookeepers by escaping from her new $5-million habitat was finally boxed in Tuesday at the Los Angeles Zoo. But it cost an additional $12,000 to modify the zoo's showpiece primate exhibit to corral Gracie, a feisty 11-year-old who tried to lead other chimps to freedom over the exhibit's back wall. Workers installed an outcropping of phony boulders along the top of the 16-foot wall and used a grinding machine to smooth out its rough concrete side.